The Blood of an Immortal
by stonefist
Summary: Agent Mulder and Agent Scully investigate a medical discovery that sounds at first impossible.


April 27, 2007 Duke University Grounds

Center for Paranormal Research Building 2

Durham, North Carolina

8:06 a.m.

"What we have uncovered is hardly our expertise," he laughed lightly. "I don't know how to catagorize this particular phenomena. The laboratory and all its personnel are, shall we say, at a loss."

The lead scientist, a man scarcely out of his thirties with long, wispy brown hair, scratched his unshaven chin absently. In need of a comb and a razor and perhaps a few hygiene lessons, the genius level researcher chuckled as if to only himself. Then, he looked again to the two people in his lab with red and white visitor badges in a way that seemed he was just realizing they were still present.

"It's not paranormal, you see." He paused, then added, " Well, it certainly isn't normal, but it doesn't fall under the conventional scenarios dealing with the paranormal, either."

With a roll of lovely, green eyes, one stranger turned slowly to her partner, her mouth already open for a comment.

"It's not conventionally paranormal," she mused with arched eyebrows and a tone that did little to hide her mockery.

When her sultry voice faded, her partner pretended to hear none of it.

"Doctor, on the 'phone you stated that it was imperative that your findings be confirmed by 'the highest of authorities, legal and scientific'. Is that correct?" The lady's partner shot her a glance of smug certainty.

_You'll see,_ his eyes told her. _Just wait. You'll see._

She squeezed tight her soft, pink lips and gave a long, deliberate exhale through her nose. She closed her eyes. One could have imagined her standing at a precipice and resigning herself to falling at any moment.

"Doctor," she muttered, eyes still closed.

Her partner interrupted.

"Share with us, Doctor Liamm. You made a call and the F.B.I. sent us. We are all ears."

The male agent was a handsome man, brown haired and lean. His smile was two-fold, as it often was. It pronounced interest for the doctor, but also illustrated personal satisfaction in himself and pleasure at his partner's apparent irritation, most times one in the same thing. His smile was quite disarming at any rate.

Had she not grown accustomed to it, somewhat impervious to the charm, Special Agent Dana Scully might have been swayed. As it was, she was not surprised and not amused in the least.

"My partner is very interested in your "findings", Doctor. I must say, however, I myself am a bit skeptical. You will forgive us if we urge you to get to your point with the most efficiency."

Special Agent Fox Mulder snorted.

Agent Scully stared at him.

Smile intact, he never looked her way.

"I do not think her evaluation is correct," he told the researcher. "I do not think 'a bit skeptical' covers her true feelings."

The scientist snapped his head up to look at Agent Mulder, eyes surprised again. He reddened somewhat and shook his unkempt head.

"I'm sorry," he allowed regretfully. "I was someplace else for a moment...what were you saying?" He shrugged without waiting for an answer and turned away from them, fiddling with a pile of paper on a nearby counter. "I hate to be rude, so please don't mistake my rush, but I am quite tied up with study. We must press through this meeting so that my work can resume."

"Doctor," Agent Scully snapped in beginning what would have probably been quite a retort.

Agent Mulder knew the tone and the look in her beautiful, wide eyes and stepped into the fray once more for the good Doctor Liamm.

"Tell us then, Doctor. What exactly have you discovered? You said you got an odd report from a local hospital e.r. and investigated. What did you find?"

Doctor Liamm found a file folder and stuffed a myriad of wrinkled, wadded, torn and somewhat dirty paper pages into it. He held it out to Agent Mulder, who took it in awe and opened it slowly.

"It's all in there," Doctor Liamm said. "The whole story. But, mind you, it's not like the other files I have given you before, Agent Mulder. This one is not conjecture; it is pure fact, research, analysis, and proof." He nodded with a telling expression. "The truth is in there."

Agent Scully twisted about to keep her eyes on her partner as he began to pace and read. Her ire was awakened anew, and she felt generous, more than willing to share.

"Mulder? What are you not telling me? Files from before? You know the good doctor? Mulder!" she insisted through ground teeth. She closed the gap between herself and her partner and clutched onto his arm.

He looked at her with a feigned innocence.

"Scully, I'm investigating here," he remarked dryly.

"Agent Mulder has been very kind to our department, Miss," Doctor Liamm noted aloud. "He has been willing to lend a professional ear to a lot of our study his peers will not respect. The F.B.I. is very lucky to have him." "So he keeps telling them. By the way, Doctor, how many files and caseworks has he reviewed for you?" She glared back at Mulder. Mulder was oblivious, lost in his world of a manila folder and white paper.

The doctor shrugged. "I lost count years ago. It has become almost informal, there are so many. In fact, the local field office won't even respond to us anymore. They have us patched directly to Agent Mulder's department in Washington."

Scully turned again in a new aim to find Mulder. He had wandered to the far left of the room, a good distance from them.

"Doctor Liamm, excuse me for a moment, please," she said, begrudging smile locked in place on her elegant countenance.

Without waiting for a response, she followed Mulder's absent pacing to a stop near the only window in the third floor lab.

"Scully, this is truly amazing-"

"Mulder, did Skinner really authorize this little trip?" she interrupted flatly. Her fiery green eyes bored into him. That intensity she could ignite made her seem much larger than her true five feet and four inches of petite structure.

He stopped reading and looked down from several inches of height above her, his boyish grin gone, his expression real and new.

"Mulder, I'm not kidding around here. Did Skinner really assign us this report? Is it actually an ongoing X-file, or is this one of those times you have led us off to chase the ghost of reality abandoned? Does Skinner even know where we are?" she added with exasperation. She lightly tossed her arms up and let them drop limply. "Will I be in a hearing next week for this unauthorized expenditure, Mulder?"

"He's a genius, Scully," Mulder stated with a glance at the doctor.

"He's absent from his own discussions, Mulder."

"Did you know they say that Einstein could not find his way to his own home and had to be reminded things like wearing his coat in the cold and-"

"So this is Einstein, Mulder?" she interrupted. She shook her head. "We are going to be in front of a review board explaining this to directors and assistant directors we have never even heard of, aren't we?"

"When we show this record to the tight suits of Langley, I don't think they are going to mind that we-"

She stormed away from him and approached the door to the lab.

"Mulder, I'll be in the car," she said when she stopped to open the door. "Doctor, don't forget your coat...it's cold out."

Her temporary pass activated the auto doors and she left without a glance over her shoulder.

Mulder watched her through the doors of glass as she walked for the elevator and entered it, then kicked himself for it. He knew better. He respected her. He valued her friendship. She was his partner. He should have spoken, should have stopped her. He wanted her to understand this one. Even she would see this time. This one was different.

He closed the file folder and walked to the doctor.

The doctor looked up from his writing at a cold, gray steel desk and frowned as if surprised suddenly.

"Agent Mulder, are you still here?" he asked. "My aides should have told me. I would have gotten you a refreshment or something."

Mulder smiled and declined. "No thanks, Doctor Liamm. I do have a question for you, though. Do they make a pill to make partners more tolerable?"

The doctor frowned.

"I'm sorry, I don't think...no, I am fairly certain they do not...then again..."

"Just kidding, Doctor," Mulder chuckled. "About the casefile, though, I would like to know how many other people you have told about this ongoing study."

Doctor Liamm raised his hands in subjection and winked. "We are alone in this work, Agent Mulder. I would not tell just anyone."

The agent smiled, said his good-byes, and promised to follow up soon.

When he reached the door, the doctor called him.

"Agent Mulder," he stalled nervously.

He stopped and turned back to the researcher.

"About that pill..." he stuttered. "They haven't found a medical cure for love."

Mulder froze.

The scientist resumed his writing.

Agent Fox Mulder snorted. Maybe the doctor was crazy.

_I hope you are stark raving mad,_ he thought to himself desperately.

After some of their misadventures, Mulder would have to say he had at some points struggled with his affection for his partner, if he were to be honest.

He was almost never honest about that with himself.

At the car, Scully was on the 'phone with someone when Mulder arrived. She had just closed her little silver unit when he opened the driver door.

"Who was that? Skinner?" Mulder guessed, noting the sour look on Scully. He belted himself into the rental sedan, waiting for a comment that did not come.

Scully sniffed, dabbed at one eye, then turned to look out the window.

The beginning of her grief gripped Mulder and seemed to suffocate him. He wanted urgently to roll down his window, but it was cold and he really wanted to listen when Scully was ready to talk. He looked at her softly. It was no mystery, of course, what was plaguing her.

She had told him about her mother's recent development healthwise. She needed a friend a few weeks before when the 'phone call hit her.

Her father had died in years gone by her, but it still wore on her resilience to life. He had been her strength at times, and at others her weakness. He had been both inspiration and depression. Still, she woke at times to hear him calling out to her, from the realm between sleep and awareness, calling to his Starbuck, his little girl.

Then, her sister had been murdered. Killed by shadow operatives who had mistaken her for Scully, her killing had been brutal. Dana Scully would never forgive herself for that. She would also never forget about it, and if the X-files could keep her close to finding rogue agents and shadow organizations, she would work them forever.

But, despite her strong outlook, when her mother had called...when she had been diagnosed...terminal...a lot of walls in Scully had been toppled, some foundations shook. She persevered, but there was a lingering sense of loss that haunted her.

Especially when they talked on the 'phone, both trying not to bring it up. Fear is a hunter, a hard one to elude.

Mulder reached and touched her face.

"Mulder...Fox, I appreciate you, I do, but I'm okay." She patted him on his arm and pointed at the file. "Go ahead. Bore me."

"Dana," Mulder said. His eyes cared a lot.

"Mulder, really," she ordered, looking away from him.

He nodded to no one.

"That genius doctor has given us something the world will want, Scully. Of course, a lot of his data is based on the findings of an emergency room surgeon in the Duke Medical Center, a Doctor Callie Anderson. You won't be able to believe this, when you see-"

"What is it about?" she interrupted, taking the file.

"The Doc found immortality, Scully...or should I say, found an immortal. Right in her e.r., Scully, she witnessed an undeniable mystery that can only be solved with the belief in immortals...or at least one immortal."

She did not respond until she had flipped two pages. Her eyes scanned quickly but intensely over the details of a patient that had literally come back to life after dying...then began to heal before the eyes of three staff members and the doctor herself. The detail involved was impossible but, and medical specialist as she was, Scully should know, the file read complete. The file was in order, competent, scientifically designed...and excluded the possibilities of wild assumption. Blood pressure readings, pulse rates, changes in both, every twenty to forty-five seconds, wound pictures and elaborate scale photographs of change as it healed before their very eyes all lay in the file, arranged as only a professional would have recorded it. The file was not misunderstood or misconstrued...either Callie Anderson was being honest in her discovery or she was a liar, there was no other alternative.

The history was quick and concise. A man was brought into the e.r. with multiple gunshot wounds and lacerations and a small explosives wound on his left side. Emergency told the doctor he had bled out twice...then began bleeding again. The file told how many liters the body had produced at a fast rate just to bleed...and survive. The tissue seemed to knit itself back together as they watched. It was unbelievable, literally, even though the surgeon saw it for herself and recorded it, so she took blood and skin samples and stored them. She tended the man who, according to the chart, was caucasian, very muscular, very hairy, and inhumanly heavy.

She tended him until he got up and left when unobserved. The cells and samples were sent to Doctor Liamm, who tested them and found they would regenerate...no matter what he did to them. The test data was all there.

"Yeah, there's more," Mulder grinned.

She stared blankly at the papers while he maneuvered the car into highway traffic. "Impossible."

"I'm driving us to the e.r. so we can see Doctor Anderson."

"Mulder, there is no way this can be," she said all the while unsure for herself. "No way. I have seen so many things that are hard to explain, but this would be a medical miracle."

"What if he is a product of something, Scully? Some experiment, some test subject? Doctor Anderson has more information, some she held back on paper but shared only in person with Doctor Liamm. The x-rays, Scully. They took x-rays of the guy. He was unusually heavy, right?"

Scully nodded. "Report says really, really heavy."

Mulder was in pure glee.

"His entire skeleton showed up as some sort of metal. Head to toe."

According to the file, the man was in a firefight with a band of Japanese mafia known only as the Hand. That was what a reporting officer had written. He had called E.M.S. in when he found the man near death in a parking garage where thirty-two 'ninja-looking' dead bodies were found. The men had been slain by bladed weapons of some kind.

"Mulder, this report is not truth. It sounds like a cheap action movie. I mean, I've heard of the Hand, but ninja clans in North Carolina? And, are we to gather that this one 'immortal' of yours killed everyone of the 'ninjas'? To be certain-"

"Maybe it is exaggerated. If you read a little further down, the Hand bodies disappeared while Officer Ortega was back at his car on the radio. Who knows what he added and elaborated. The other parts are different. They seem real, Scully. I feel it."

Mulder watched her turn slowly to him.

"Mulder, how many times have you said that?"

"So many that sometimes it feels like a lie even to me."

She leaned her head in concern.

"Mulder?"

"Scully, I am tired of no one seeing what I see...hearing what I hear...let's be honest, you have a perfect knack for being ten minutes late to see anything, and coming in just in time to know something is weird but missing the details." He shrugged. "Unless someone kills both doctors, all their lab techs, and the immortal guy, we have some truth in our hands."

"Morbid, Mulder. That was morbid."

"They do call me Spooky," he said irritably.

She chuckled lightly. "I thought that was because of your dancing."

He looked at her and smiled fully.

"Nice. Thanks a lot."

April 27, 2007

Duke Medical Center Properties

Durham, North Carolina

8:52 a.m.

"Doctor Anderson is not here," the lady snapped.

"I see that," Mulder answered once again.

"We asked when she would be back," Dana Scully added.

The head e.r. nurse stepped face to face with Mulder in an aggressive advance. She plopped large hands on heavy hips and cocked her head to one side.

"Just who do you _think_ you are? You think 'cause you ride the government train that we owe you something special? We have policies. One of them is that we don't offer personal information about our staff, even when you come in here sportin' a badge and an i.d. card. Where she is don't make no nevermind. When she's comin' back don't neither. She'll be here when she gets here."

"You understand that we represent the Federal Government, that we work for the F.B.I., and that you are impeding an investigation-"

"I understand that you talk a lot but don't listen," the nurse said with a shake of her head.

"Nurse Berry, we don't mean to steamroll your policy, but-"

"Oh, all of a sudden you have a warrant?" she interrupted Scully. "'Cause, when I asked a minute ago, you didn't have one. Now, you gonna 'steamroll' us and put us in our place, gonna take over this-"

"Ma'am, you misunderstand our intent-" Mulder attempted again.

"Now, I'm stupid, is that it? Can't understand English, is that it?" she asked even louder. She continued even over Mulder and Scully trying to calm her. "Is it cause I'm a southerner, a dimwit from North Carolina, or is it bigger than that?"

Mulder looked around at the crowd watching.

Scully looked at Mulder. _Do something, _her eyes screamed.

"Maybe it is bigger," Nurse Berry shouted abruptly. She looked over her shoulder to an access hallway when the doors locked shut from someone passing through them. When she looked back again, she was even angrier. "Bein' black got anything to do with this persecution? Or is it cause I ain't the right kinda black?"

"What!" Scully exploded.

Mulder noticed one of the other nurses look into the small window at the center of the access hall's door, as if peeking at something...or checking on something she did not want to reveal by opening the door.

"The name is Nurse Berry, but maybe 'cause it's Mabel Berry and not sweet lil' Halle Berry, no respect is expected? That right?"

Mulder stormed away from her.

"Oh, no! No you don't! Don't you leave Miss Lilly White Fed back here with me and try to roll passed!" Mabel Berry shouted.

Dana Scully let the woman pursue Mulder two steps and then tripped her. When Berry lay face down on the tile, she wrapped her arms up behind her and slipped thumbcuffs into place.

"For your own safety," she muttered with a vengeful smile.

Fox Mulder slammed his open hand against the access hall door. The nurse standing near it moved away quickly, but Mulder caught her by the arm.

"May I have your attention?" he called to the staff, holding onto the short nurse. He had to shout to be heard over the shouting insults launched by Mabel Berry. "We need to speak with Doctor Callie Anderson. Was she just here?"

"What is going on here!" a woman bellowed from another hall entrance. "Who are you people!"

She was a homely woman, very short hair cropped close and facial features like a man's. Her small eyes were hidden by large, thick, round glasses in a pale brown frame. She barely broke five feet of height, and weighed in at maybe a hundred pounds of skin and bones. When she fired that voice of hers, shrill and scratchy, she belied her small stature with the wail of a banshee.

"Please get off of her!" she ordered, stalking for Scully.

Mulder lifted his i.d. high and addressed the woman.

"We are Special Agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, F.B.I., ma'am."

Scully wrestled Berry to her feet, then readied her key to release her.

Mulder walked their way after letting his held nurse go.

"Mabel, please go on break," Doctor Anderson was saying when he got to them.

The large woman spun on Scully angrily but the doctor stepped in the way.

Scully smiled, eased back her sportcoat, and flashed her badge again.

"Doctor Anderson," she said politely, eyeing Berry.

"We thought you were not here," Fox Mulder offered.

Berry stormed away with cursing engaged.

Scully cut to the point.

"Doctor, we were called to review some findings you recorded and shared with Doctor Liamm at the Paranormal Research Facility. Let me say, from one medical professional to another, you falsify like no one I have encountered." Her green eyes flashed with the aggression.

Mulder opened his mouth two seconds later than the doctor.

"I feel horrible that you found out," was her reply. "Am I being charged?"

Scully eyed her oddly and smiled.

"Doctor Anderson?" Mulder spoke incredulously. "What are you saying? Are we to understand that your findings were false? For what?"

"Let us retire to my office. People here have work to do."

Mulder watched the staff milling about, working but heavily distracted.

Scully nodded. "Let's do that, Doctor. Before we do, though, are you on duty or not?"

She shook her head. "I am not. I came in to take care of some things. We have been short staffed and I have been spending a lot of time here. Left a lot of things here that I need to take home."

"Then I suppose we cannot charge Nurse Berry with lying to us, or impeding an investigation. How lucky for her." Scully squinted and looked around the place. "You have an unusually loyal staff here, Doctor. Most hospital staff is not as personally attached to a doctor or surgeon. Particularly, you would agree, if the said doctor has an outside practice."

"I don't," she responded curtly. "That may be reason enough to be loyal, though I am not sure what you mean by that. We don't give out personal information, you see, it's a policy. Mabel was just doing her job."

Mulder smiled his wolfish, on-the-inside smile.

"Not just Nurse Berry, Doctor. Your other nurses gave no information, either, and one of them was watching that hallway, presumably for your arrival." He pointed to the access hall. "Tell us, Doctor, do you have enemies?"

Scully watched her reactions like a hawk. So did her partner.

The woman just gestured toward the access hall and started that way.

"My office awaits, if you wish to continue this."

The corridor was well lit and busy, for what was signed to be an accessway. One would expect to see maintenance crews and the sort filtering in and out of store rooms. It was very different, though, as it was full of medical personnel, obviously busy in their efforts to do all sorts of lab work in rooms lining both sides of the hall.

Scully noted the signs and the biohazard tags on the walls, readings the codes and jotting mentally the chemicals in use on the hall.

Mulder was intent on his mystery, and watched only the movements of the little doctor. He chuckled once to himself when they passed the door that had a 'QUIET PLEASE' on it, interested by its placement. Right beside it was the door to the morgue elevator.

"Do you think that's really a problem?" he tossed over his shoulder to Scully.

She rolled her eyes and said nothing.

The doctor's office was open, and decoration was indeed sparse. A couch, which had not seen a lot of use, and a table, totally empty, stood in the space. A few pictures, but no personal ones, dotted the walls, with no frames around them. In a pile in one corner were dirty clothes from the look of them, and in another corner a suitcase lay open, clean clothes inside it.

Callie Anderson sat behind the only desk in the room, an obvious void of the paper mess one would have assumed an office in this shape would have made.

"Sit down, make yourselves comfortable," she offered, indicating they should sit on the couch. "I don't have a lot of guests. Forgive the lack of seating."

Mulder accommodated her and laced his fingers together, his arms braced over his legs, leaning forward. He looked at Scully who just looked out into the hall as a responsive movement.

"Doctor Anderson, you are a brilliant surgeon and a first-class specialist in the field of blood work and cell research," the lady agent started. "I have read a lot of your articles in the journals, studied some of your work and theorems when I was fighting an artificially induced cancer. I see you have continued in your quest for answers...in blood."

She turned red and looked down at her desk.

"I did not know I was so famous," she muttered, fiddling with a pen near a notepad underneath her 'phone.

"On the open pages of medical writing, you command quite a presence. Your statement seven years ago...'Blood is where both health and sickness are born and killed. Medical science must learn that blood is where all the battles between the two lie.' Doctor Anderson, about whom were you really writing that? Medical science knows about blood. Was that a personal jab at a contemporary-"

"You came here for a history lesson, Agent...Scully, was it? Did you read that seven years ago and it took this long to come and investigate your personal curiosities? I am confused, you see, for you pointed out that it was Doctor Liamm that instigated this."

Mulder marveled at Scully, shocked that she had such a grasp on the medical field's players on seemingly every level. He could not hold his tongue any longer, however.

"You made a record of 'discovery', and passed it to Doctor Liamm. Are you prepared to say now it was a hoax?"

She chuckled heartlessly.

"Well?" Scully spoke softly.

Anderson opened a drawer and pulled a loose bundle of papers from it. She arranged them quickly, then tossed them to Mulder. He nearly dropped a few.

"Liamm is a wonderful man. He was a cutting edge researcher in his own field...about ten years ago."

"What is your problem with him, Doctor?" Mulder queried.

"Not a problem, Agent...Mulder?" she verified. "Reginald Liamm is one of my heroes. He simply has become someone who is a shadow...a ghost...of his once magnificent stature."

Scully was rampantly scattered in thought, and found her elusive, drawn on conversation annoying at best.

"Doctor...Anderson, wasn't it?" she toyed. "I do not wish to be unkind, but whatever you want to say, say it. You started this ball rolling with whatever you gave to Liamm." She scoured her with her analytical eyes. "Doctor, between two medical professionals one to another, no one would take the jab I gave you before we came to your office if you were really hoaxing everyone. You would have exploded in defense of your lie to protect it. I don't believe your report, in its high fantasy content, but I must say, dear doctor, I believe you believe it."

Mulder laughed silently, shaking in his seat.

The doctor was livid.

"Of all the nerve! You come here, accuse me of lying on a findings report, imply that I have no integrity," she shouted, standing. "Then you had your plan to drive me into admission of wrongdoing because you cannot accept the possibility of a miraculous discovery that defies the very fabric of our knowledge of medical science!" She shook with anger.

"Take a breath, Doctor," Mulder suggested, standing across from her.

"And, there it is, Doctor," Scully said. "You are not hoaxing, not purposely. You actually believe your report. That makes this a whole new interview."

She stared angrily at the agents.

"No interviews here, I think," she muttered through clenched teeth. "It is a cold interrogation."

Mulder glanced urgently at Scully, then spoke.

"Please answer a few questions, Doctor, please," he urged. "I want to understand your report, your study. Just give me a chance to fully understand."

The woman looked directly at Dana Scully alone.

"She has already decided I am unfounded in my belief. She won't understand."

Scully left the room without warning.

Mulder sighed. "Please, share with me."

"A few days ago, I drew blood from an...immortal. I, of course, can prove it. I will start by saying he was an amazing patient. Mr. Logan." The doctor spoke loftily as she walked to close the door.


End file.
